L'Aimant

Summary:

A group outing to the flickers* proves to be a revelation - in more than one sense.

Set after "Broken Souls". November 1944.

In this chapter, we're still in the early hours of Saturday morning, 4th November. Foyle and Sam are at Steep Lane discovering each other for the first time.

*see "More Author's Notes" at end

Disclaimer:

The creative rights to the characters and plotlines in "Foyle's War" belong to Anthony Horowitz. This story is a not-for-profit homage to the television series, to the talented actors who bring its characters to life, and to a fascinating era.

Author's Notes:

Thanks to my lovely muses, dancesabove and TartanLioness who have nursed me every step of the way through the creative process.

I have managed to retain this fic at T-rating, but it was a struggle. For that reason, I've decided to also publish an M-rated version of this particular chapter as a separate fic. Look for it as "L'Aimant – Chap 2 (M)" (but you will need to change your search-filter settings to "Rated - M" or "Rating: All" first).

If you prefer your spectacles un-steamed and stick with this T-rated version, you will miss nothing salient to the plot.

I'd like to thank dancesabove for her excellent beta-work on this fic.

Previously, in "L'Aimant"

She took in his scent of Robin starch and spicy aftershave and… Foyle. His lips, two pads of supple, urgent joy, were moist and soft. He shifted and Sam thought that she would never breathe again.

Except of course she had to, and she did. But not before her hands had risen slowly to his hair and stroked at last the waves that gathered at his nape.

And having breathed, she called him "Christopher".

Chapter 2

Foyle stood in the hallway of 31 Steep Lane, feeding on Samantha Stewart's lips with the grateful intensity of a starving man invited in for supper.

Her hands had just reached up behind his neck to stroke his hair, and the action sent a gentle frisson of pleasure through his body.

To be pressed so close to Sam felt wonderfully comforting. But when she broke their kiss and whispered "Christopher" in an enraptured voice, the pace of their encounter shifted up a gear.

Ye gods! To hear his Christian name from Sam's lips shot a rocket to Foyle's core, altering in that instant every bleak and gloomy prejudice he held about his future. A long-dead section of his brain ignited, pushing powerful imperatives towards his groin. It was a rolling wave of pleasure heading full-tilt for the shore.

Foyle knew full well from memory, albeit distant, the inevitable consequence of such sensations if he didn't act right now, and so he pulled his lower body back from hers. Mercifully, then, the wave subsided.

"Mmm. Christoph..?" Registering the hurried shift in his position, Sam fretted that she had perhaps done something wrong. But Foyle's hands stayed firmly planted on her shoulders as his body drew away.

Their eyes locked, reading possibilities for now, and next, and later.

Foyle's conscience pricked him then. He cleared his throat.

"Samantha," he began—for she never could be simply 'Sam' again to him, like this. And then his troubled conscience forced him to confess.

"Samantha. You... are lovely. I'm... a fraud. I didn't ask you here to… be hospitable". He savoured her full name again: three velvet syllables of longed-for bliss. Then he held her gaze, and waited meekly to be punished and rejected.

Sam broke the heavy silence. "I had already worked that out, you know," she offered lightly, feigning nonchalance. She gave the tiniest of shrugs (lest it dislodge his hands atop her shoulders). "But seeing as I'm here... with not the slightest thought of prosecuting you for fraud... and not a leg to stand on when it comes to honesty, myself..."

He heard this for the pardon that it was. The corners of his lips turned downwards to suppress a smile, his eyes twinkling with affection as Sam fixed him with a gaze both challenging and insolent, her eyebrows raised in expectation. Then her eyes dropped to his mouth and settled there. She licked her lips.

Foyle wasn't one to shrink from challenges – particularly ones issued with such delicious directness - and so he leant in, gamely, to resume the kiss. This time his hands rose to caress her hair, his fingers plunging in amongst her honey curls, thumbs stroking at her temples.

Need to finish what you've started, came his inner voice again.

He mumbled through the kiss, "Samantha... Mmwould you…mmconsider coming upstairs with me?"

She pulled away and turned her head to give Foyle's hallway an offhand inspection. "I think it's really rather chilly down here in the hall, don't you?"

It was a blatant tease, and all at once, Foyle recognised that Sam was in the driving seat and had already made a choice of destination for herself.

Nothing in their previous dealings had prepared him for such a reversal of roles, but this was the moment that remodelled their relationship. Her resoluteness lifted a responsibility from his shoulders and absolved him of the guilty role of being her seducer. Foyle chuckled; reached to stroke her cheek. "As ever, you amaze me, Sam."

Sam was briefly proud of getting such a good result with just bravado. She had correctly read the circumstances and detected that her biggest obstacles would be Foyle's sense of chivalry and his burden of authority. Then she'd set out to seduce her man by circumventing one and banishing the other. Now Foyle was at her feet, as sure as if she'd hit him with a dustbin lid.

The "bin-lid" image, cruel though it was, cheered Sam considerably through her nerves. Bravado was all very well, but for the next stage she needed to be genuinely brave—not least because, here, she was entering uncharted territory. Virginity being both the convention and the curse of her sex and generation, she had never seen a man "there", let alone touched one.

But now it seemed that all this was about to change, and as Foyle led her gently up the dozen steps towards the landing, she felt a clutch of trepidation in her belly, as though she were ascending to a different plane.

The landing of 31 Steep Lane was actually familiar territory. At Foyle's kind invitation, Sam had lodged in Andrew's room for several nights when bombed out of her digs some years earlier. But never had she set a toe inside the DCS's bedroom.

Nor, she resolved, was she about to do so now. In her determined mindset, that world was of the past. Mr Foyle was no more. This man was Christopher.

Foyle halted at his bedroom door and stroked the soft fingers resting in his own. He rubbed his thumb across them, contemplating Sam's pale skin and nails. Then he drew her hand palm-upwards to his mouth, and placed a tender kiss there.

He pulled her gently towards him, and she sank into his arms, their bodies flush from mouth to knee. This time Foyle would make no attempt to keep his distance as the now familiar surge of pleasure filled the length of him. Sam felt the rise against her belly.

Conceding that a watershed had now been reached, Foyle upped the ante. He covered Sam's mouth with his own, pushing gently with his tongue to request access.

Granted entry, he invaded softly, deepening the kiss.

They stood like this some little while, exploring to the limits of arousal, pausing here and there to whisper urgent oaths, and names, and warm endearments.

Eventually the moment came when Sam's knees buckled with the intensity of their prolonged embrace. Foyle, sensing her about to crumple, broke the kiss, gathered her left arm around his neck, then bent his knees and scooped her legs from under her, resuming contact with her lips where they had just left off.

Sam had no time to register surprise at this manoeuvre. Although she had long admired the cut of his suits across his shoulders, it had never crossed her mind that someone barely taller than herself-in-modest-heels could wield such upper body strength and lift her like a rolled-up rug.

But then she had no proper point of reference for the male physique and its potential quietly to astonish.

This gap in her education was shortly to be filled.

With a kind of sixth-sense navigation (Brookie might have called it RADAR), Foyle steered them, blind, in through the bedroom door, still feasting eagerly on Sam's lips as she lay cradled in his arms.

In two or three steps he was at the bed, an eiderdown-topped, neatly-made affair. He stooped to place her gently down upon the quilt, leaning over her to continue the caress.

"So soft…" breathed Sam, and hardly knew if she was speaking of his lips or of the eiderdown. Either way, the epithet was challenged when he climbed up alongside her and pressed his body into to hers. "So firm," she sighed, and turned then to accommodate his form.

Things started beautifully thus. It was Sam's first time, but Foyle's hands were instruments of worship on her body, and brought her to an ecstasy that drove her into pressing him for more - for everything he had, in fact. Against his better judgement, he complied, expecting to be able to protect her and control the outcome. Keep her safe.

But neither he nor Sam anticipated how their bodies would betray them.

For Sam, the act was ultimately painful, and her physical reaction so intense it caught him unawares, and caused him then to spend inside her when he had intended to withdraw.

To both of them, the fright and the dismay of this disaster were so profound that they were momentarily struck dumb. Then Foyle looked down at her with an expression of mortification, running a trembling hand over his hair.

"Oh, God. Forgive me, Sam," he begged.

"You. Said…s-safe!" gulped Sam, stunned, eyes agog and mouth agape with shock.

Foyle knelt up then, and back from her, his head grasped in his hands. Not only had he just hurt Sam enough in taking her virginity that she had sobbed at the discomfort, but he had also very likely put her in the family way as well. The horror of these realisations warred viciously against his traitorous body, which, physically, was totally relaxed and sated.

They stayed immobile for some time. Foyle was an icon of abject misery, chewing at his cheek with pursed lips, tears welling up. He closed his eyes and reached up to wipe his forehead on his wrist.

But even as he sat there, hoping to be struck by lightning, a pale hand crept towards his thigh and stroked it. "Christopher." The voice was Sam's, a little tremulous, but recognisable now, at least.

Foyle closed his eyes again and moved his hand to shield his mouth. "Darling. Believe me. If I could take it back…" he began, and silent tears of exasperation and remorse came coursing down his cheeks.

"Christopher." Again, Sam's voice, increasingly a voice of calm. "Please don't feel bad." Deep breath, and then more brightly: "I shouldn't think that any harm's been done. And if it has, well, as my father always says, 'fortune favours the brave'!"

It seemed to her that there was still some use for her bravado after all.

Sam's mention of her father did sweet nothing to encourage Foyle. In his imagination, Iain Stewart had him flayed and then castrated, burning at the stake for good measure. But this was not a time to dwell upon his own preoccupations; his concern was, first and foremost, Sam.

"Don't know what to say," he whispered, and then demonstrated fully that he didn't. His face was tight-lipped, stony, still and stricken.

It fell to Sam to make the first move. She reached her hand out, clasping his, and drew him down against her in forgiveness. When he was lying down, she stole into his arms.

And Christopher drew the covers over them in silence, and sank his nose into her hair, and lay awake, still grim-faced, keeping vigil as she slept.

****** TBC ******

More Author's Notes:

(By all means skip these if I'm being a background bore.)

Virginity in Sam's day was a Heap Big Deal. As a late baby to a mother born in 1917, I've often listened to my mother on the subject. She scared the hell out of me, I can tell you. Not about the physical side, but about the moral opprobrium suffered by women who were known to have lost theirs prior to marriage. At any rate, the stories worked on me. I bet I was the last of my contemporaries to surrender mine!

Half of me didn't believe my mother. I thought she must be exaggerating. Then, an obituary of one Sarah Baring appeared in The Telegraph. This lady had just died at 93. A debutante in 1938, and erstwhile employee at BletchleyPark, home of the wartime codebreakers, she eventually married (and divorced, God bless her!) an aristocrat. Her take on virginity was as follows:

"Nobody told us anything about the facts of life. We were all ignorant, and if we had known we'd have thought it disgusting. Certainly, I and all my close friends would have considered ourselves defiled if we hadn't come to marriage as virgins. Even after you had become engaged, it made no difference. Virginity lasted right up until the wedding night.

"My mother had died before I got married, so my aunt, Kitty Brownlow, was supposed to tell me the facts of life. But all she said was: 'Don't worry too much if it hurts—it gets better.' I thought sex was just for procreation. At deb dances there were a few girls of whom we'd say 'They do it, you know!'—though perhaps all they did was cuddle and kiss behind bushes. But even that was definitely disapproved of. I never heard of any pregnancies, and can remember no sex scandals at all. If boys tried to pounce, the word soon got around. They were described as NSIT—Not Safe In Taxis—and girls warned each other to avoid them."

I showed this to my mum, and she fixed me with one of those "told-you-so" looks that mothers give to daughters.

Regarding my use of the word "flickers" in the summary: "flickers", as a term for cinema, was somewhat archaic in the UK in the 1940s, but two first-hand sources of mine remember using it or hearing it back in the days. It really harks back to the silent era, but I picked it for its slightly pompous ring – a bit like referring to your old mate Bob as Roberto ;0)

There's a book called "I Found it at the Flickers" written by John Michael Howson – the one review I've managed to find bills it as a nostalgia trip on growing up in Melbourne in the Forties. Indications are that it is out of print, but I would love to get my hands on a copy, so if anybody knows of one, please message me.

Pedantic point perhaps, but I misinformed you in the notes to Chapter 1 about the date of the last Hastings alert. It was in fact Thursday 9th November 1944. No matter – I would still have changed the date to Friday 3rd!

I hope you'll stick with me to the end of the story. There may be trouble ahead, but nothing that the two of them can't overcome together.

GiuC